ANDREA MAKI ART + AWARENESS

Andrea Maki, the founder and president of Wild Love Preserve, is a contemporary visual artist and photographer whose professional art career spans over 30 years, exhibiting and in collections nationally, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Born in Seattle in 1966, Maki graduated from New York University in 1988 with a degree in painting, and her father is renowned sculptor, Robert Maki. Wild Love Preserve is an interrelated extension of Andrea Maki's conceptual multi-media work, existing as a living environmental art installation and project that will be protected in perpetuity.

"My work is not something outside of me that I do. It is what I am, it is what I know, it is my past, present and future at all times. I am in a continuous state of discovery. My intent has always been to promote positive energy, action, awareness, compassion and understanding. This is who I am, my work reflects my being. I believe humans are but a mere part of the whole and that we have a responsibility to that whole. I believe in doing all I can to have a positive effect on the environment and all living creatures. I believe in keeping ones’ word and in taking responsibility for ones’ actions. To be honest, to be forthright, to live without fear. To be open, present and aware. To not only live in the moment, but fully appreciate the moment." - Andrea Maki, 2001

To learn more about Andrea Maki's work + history, visit: AndreaMaki.com

The installation has the Andrea Maki look of hardcore elegance and compounded content that makes each of us consider beauty and reality transformed to a new level of heightened awareness. To see and experience Maki’s latest efforts in spreading awareness is to face both the pathos and beauty of the wild mustang, an American icon, and our own history. Each large scale image tells its own story, but many times their actual size, scale and detail conspire to engage and mesmerize, linking images to one another, and the lone stallion, at yet another scale. Idea and content imbue this work with nuance, discovery and emotion.

Quite aware of Pop art practices established by the likes of Duchamp, Johns, Warhol and Rauschenberg, Andrea Maki delineates her own pictorial identity. Maki’s mixed-media works rely on painting, construction, assemblage, silk screening, photography, collage, lamination... By juxtaposing disparate forms with content... Maki fulfills the meaning of jigging according to David Pye: ”placing one concept up against another.” As a result, the context for each work, like a plot, thickens... Playing off literal meanings of image, symbol and object, Maki consciously creates a kind of “synthetic cubism” by arranging found imagery to build a third surface. Laminated surfaces imply dimensions which in turn refer to space and distance. “Time” emerges, then, as a correlative entity.

Andrea Maki’s work skillfully balances photography and painting. Some of the pieces look close in spirit to those of (1960s) French artists who worked with layer upon layer of scarred and peeled posters. Others appear like old painted signs photographed by Aaron Siskind. Still others take us back to Rauschenberg’s paintings with photo-transfer images. The chief difference is that Maki gives her photographs greater prominence within each piece, generally presenting them as objects that retain their distinct character and have not been entirely subsumed by the paintings.